Bringing back Paradise at the Ajax lakeshore

Sierra Club, Town of Ajax and Toronto and Region Conservation are psyched to plant native plants and trees on Paradise Beach bioswales as part of the Great Canadian Coastal Clean-up Saturday, September 20th.

'What's a bioswale?' you may ask. A bioswale is a way of filtering surface water by channeling through plants, gravel or rip-rap and slowing it down. Silt and particulate matter will fall out and the plants in the bioswale help take out nutrients and chemicals, for instance automotive run-off from a parking lot. The plants and soil do this work for free for our benefit!

Sierra Club has received an RBC Blue Water grant to work with Ajax and TRCA to improve the water quality at Paradise Beach by installing 2 bioswales. Paradise Beach is a beautiful location on Lake Ontario but in recent years has been closed to public swimming more than half the time due to contaminated run-off. We are going to change this one bioswale at a time.

Check out our video for more information on Paradise Beach and our work to improve it. [Video Link]

Please join us at Paradise Beach on Saturday afternoon, September 20 to learn about native plants, bioswales and to help us achieve this goal. Click on poster for more information. Free to participate! Register here .